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“Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Seapower, Senator Roger Wicker and Ranking Member, Senator Mazie Hirono hosted a hearing to explore options and considerations for achieving a 355-ship Navy. CSBA Senior Fellow Bryan Clark was invited to give testimony.”
Bryan Clark, a naval analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the RFI “opens up the aperture too much” in terms of what that future frigate might look like.
“It makes it seem like it could be anything from … a relatively low-end ship or less capable ship, all the way up to a frigate that can do air defense for another ship and do anti-submarine warfare,” he said.
In an effort to save money, the Navy might buy a vessel with insufficient capabilities, he said.
The RFI “establishes a capability hierarchy that could support development of a less expensive and less capable ship that does not meet the Navy’s needs,” he said.
In response to a question from subcommittee chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Bryan Clark, a retired submariner and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said he thought the RFI was too vague and questioned whether the U.S. Navy actually knows what it wants.
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments senior fellow Bryan Clark said during the hearing that he worried the Navy had begun this process with too many details left undecided, and said that the Navy should be able to better determine what it wants without first requiring industry feedback.
“I don’t think it does move us in the right direction”, Clark said. “It opens up the aperture too much in terms of what that future frigate could be.
Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, told Inside Defense that when he was working on the Navy staff in the early 2010s, there was talk of reactivating the John F. Kennedy (CV-67). The estimates of getting the aircraft carrier back into service were about $1 billion.
“Our adversaries look at our budgets process and exploit it,” said Bryan Clark, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
